This month I’ve been...
THERE’S SOMETHING PEOPLE who wait for life to impress them don’t realise: you have to meet it halfway.
It’s a co-production, not a show the universe puts on for an audience of one. An interesting life doesn’t just spontaneously occur any more than the ingredients of a cake turn into one simply by being adjacent on the shelf.
And it isn’t as if the cook even has to really understand how the chemistry works, just that if you set about it, it does. I don’t think any of us is born with the knowledge of how life is best gone about, any more than we instinctively know how to bake a mille-feuille or play the pianoforte. But we knew then that getting stuck in is how you get life going. For too many of us growing up is a long process of forgetting it, in favour of an affected worldliness that’s a hedge against ever appearing unequal to the circumstances.
But there are tools available to us all that can undo all the damage. They come in pairs: your left leg and your right leg; walking and wondering; boots and curiosity. Set those to work on the world and it opens like the many-splendoured thing it really is. Instead of a future so flat you can see the headstone at the end of it, a journey full of relief, diversion and interest; a country of romantic ruin, thunderous force and secret wo
